Introduction

The objective of this book is to study the economy as a complex system and to show that the presence of self-reinforcing mechanisms in very different economic problems gives rise to common regularities and common qualitative properties. Over recent years the field of complex systems theory has mushroomed. There has been an explosion of research activity within the general area of non-linear sciences, including chaos theory, interacting particle systems, self-organized criticality models, cellular automata theory, simulated annealing learning models, stochastic approximation theory, and many others. Order, disorder, self-organization, synergetics are now notions which constitute parts of the knowledge which is increasingly being transferred from one discipline to another.